This is insubstantial stuff, light as laughter, and every bit as fleeting. [13 Feb 1982]

One of the gorier and more witless horror films in recent memory. [19 Apr 1982]

As torpedoes shoot through the seas and depth charges pass by, carrying their whining cargo of destruction, Das Boot brings the presence of death to within a whisper of the eardrum.

What advance publicity has been powerless to suggest is that Personal Best is an exceptionally well-crafted, thoroughly accurate, emotionally galvanizing piece of filmmaking, easily one of the most intelligent explorations of competition on cinematic record. What's best about Personal Best is a lot more than just personal .[5 Feb 1982]

The reach of this sprawling, ambitious epic often exceeds its grasp. It has something in common with its hero. [5 Dec 1981]

Any chance the film might have had is trashed at the outset by Chase's disengaged style of non- acting and blas approach to pants-dropping. [28 Dec 1981]

Absence of Malice is lively, provocative and intelligent, three qualities in short supply this Christmas. It simplifies, but it rarely distorts, and it doggedly picks at sores journalists would just as soon banish by Band-aid. [19 Dec 1981]

A rancid, violent police picture starring and directed by Burt Reynolds who, like bad news, is everywhere this year. [19 Dec 1981]

In concert with composer Bill Conti and scriptwriter Larry Gelbart, Neighbors has become a hyper insult festival in which four people pointlessly humiliate each other in a variety of increasingly vicious ways. Sample dialogue: "Leave that warthead alone. C'mon, we've got cesspools to suck." It's enough to make you nostalgic for the Shavian wit of The Gong Show, for the genteel grace of Saturday afternoon wrestling. [19 Dec 1981]

Miss Fonda has thought to make a thriller out of that unthrilling process. [12 Dec 1981]

Fonda and Hepburn work gallantly against the mythic: Norman and Ethel are specific people, New Englanders, a middle-class pair without any special abilities or beliefs that might ease their slide into the oblivion at the end of life. They are Every Couple, delineated with a sharpness that only two consummate professionals working at the peak of their powers could provide. [18 Dec 1981]

Ragtime itself twinkles with delight - perhaps only an immigrant, and a recent one, could have made this film, which looks squarely at the social problems gnawing at North America but which finds, within them and without them, cause for hope. [20 Nov 1981]

Time Bandits is the best children's picture since The Black Stallion, but it is a satiric, inventive, fantastical vacation for the filmgoer of any age: imagine an intelligent Raiders of the Lost Ark with a deeply bitchy sense of humor. [06 Nov 1981]

When it's good, it's because it's imitating its predecessor (but it suffers from tired spilled blood) and when it's bad, it's because it's imitating its own imitators. [31 Oct 1981]

Why are movies about sophisticated technology and hidden persuaders and subliminal seduction - Agency is the other example that springs immediately to mind - so technically sloppy, so incapable of persuading even the smallest child of their plausibility and so utterly unable to seduce someone dying to be ravished by a well-made thriller? [2 Nov 1981]

Two great beginnings disappoint in the end. If the novel is a dying form, film treatments are the poison. [21 Sep 1981]

The synthesis is a revealing and extremely funny portrait of urban schizophrenia in the waning years of the twentieth century. [21 May 1982]

One of the pleasures of "Old Acquaintance" was watching two fanged pros chew scenery. One of the pleasures of Rich and Famous is watching two toothless amateurs gum everything in sight, including each other (the penultimate confrontation, when the teddy bear, symbol of the friendship, is ripped into stuffing, is outrageously funny). [10 Oct 1981]

Any picture in which Burt Reynolds is a man unable to find a woman willing to have his child is quite clearly a limber farce and, sure enough, the most thoroughly stretched joke in Paternity, written by Charlie Peters and directed by Winnipeg comedian David Steinberg, is how utterly wrong Reynolds is for the role of Buddy Evans. [3 Oct 1981]

If Corman productions are lacking originality, ideas and expertise, they are at least devoted to the proposition that the attention span of the modern audience is shorter than the time it takes to soft boil an egg, and they are paced accordingly. Galaxy of Terror is one of the few films in existence that actually moves faster than its trailer. [26 Apr 1982]

The Face is her face, the mannerisms are her mannerisms and Miss Dunaway manages magnificently to depict a woman whose acting off- screen is no better than her acting on.This is theoretically a modern horror movie about mother love but it is actually one of the funniest movies about how not to make a movie ever made. [25 Sept 1981]

The specifics of Hill's movie - and despite its straining for universality, it is all specifics - come approximately a decade too late; in the wake of Who'll Stop the Rain and Apocalypse Now (and even that great B-movie anti-war movie, The Big Red One), it sinks like an insignificant stone. [24 Oct 1981]

A patchwork quilt of clashing colors, but it's cozy and warm. [10 Oct 1981]

Hurt is so good at capturing the charming and chilling Ned that he almost makes up for the film's two primary weaknesses: Kasdan's inexperience and a message of significant unpleasantness. [28 Aug 1981, p.P17]

Divided into five parts, the film is the most ambitious, realistic, thorough and scrupulous feature yet released by a major studio on the subject of cops and corruption...As portrayed electrifyingly - sometimes a little too electrifyingly - by Williams, Ciello's reasons for becoming a stoolie are as complex as his reasons for becoming a cop. [29 Aug 1981]

Heavy Metal is a first-class entertainment for the class of people whose eardrums are as strong as the pans of a steel band, whose nerves could be used to conduct electricity and whose fantasies tend to the leathery: it is, in other words, a movie for horny, hell-raising teen- agers. [7 Aug 1981]

Condorman, the new Disney Studios film, has the odd exploding car or boat in it, but it is sheer amiability. [18 Aug 1981]

Victory, the new film by 74-year-old John Huston, is a civilized, professional, old-fashioned entertainment about men in groups. The picture is being hyped as a story of human spirit, prevailing against impossible odds, but it's a lot more low-key and a great deal more enjoyable than that. It's the story of the wake left by a great director sailing smoothly at half-mast. [31 July 1981]